Tuesday, April 6, 2010

Writing about nothing.

People ask me, "Kelsey, why don't I see you around?". . .Here's some of what I've been up to:

Using comedy, Shakespeare devotes this play [Much Ado About Nothing] to the exploration of this concept of “nothing”. While the word nothing would seem to imply the play is a trifling affair, this “nothing” actually shapes our lives, for they are, for the most part, filled with ordinary occurrences, or nothingness (Goddard, 271). . .Indeed, the whole of Much Ado is a masterful “escalati[on]of recriminations based on purely a chimerical assumption that must eventually be deflated” (Bevington, 221). Claudio and Hero’s naive love, the bickering Beatrice and Benedick, and the people that interfere with their respective stories intentionally employ these very lies, or nothingness created in the character’s minds, to further their own ends. . .This theme of nothingness resonates deep within the reader or observer of Much Ado. William Shakespeare adeptly utilizes what Carl Gustav Jung would later call a “Literary Archetype”, or our “innate, apriori impulses to organize images and ideas; tendencies to produce form, relatable to instincts and representing ‘the precipitate of the psychic functioning of the whole ancestral line, the accumulated experiences of organic life in general, a million times repeated, and condensed into types’ ”(Carl Gustav Jung). Deep within our very being, notions of what should be or patterns of what we deem familiar emerge, categorized by our minds, though often not realized to be existent. Writers create characters using these forms, causing them to be comparable to the archetypes in the reader’s mind. The more one has read, the more archetypes one may recognize and patterns one may observe. While archetypes certainly appear any work, they are perhaps most obvious within the genre of comedy.